It would be strange to watch it in a theater full of people who all knew the sex was real (and thus were probably there to see it for precisely that reason). Normally, when I watch a movie with sex scenes (as opposed to porn, which is a seldom-if-ever these days), I'm really not aware of or thinking much about other viewers' reactions to the sex--and I'd just as soon keep it that way. It would be difficult NOT to be aware of that in this case, I think.

Other than that, it wouldn't make much difference to me because I never watch a film and think, "OK, now these 2 actors are simulating sex"--instead I think "OK, now these 2 characters are having sex." So it wouldn't make the content itself seem more "obscene," IMO.

Plus, it might make for a more realistic portrayal of how sex actually looks in real life, which could be a welcome change. I've always liked how European films are unafraid to show a little clumsiness and awkwardness--as opposed to American films where it's usually laughably over-choreographed and all about looks, not feeling.

That's the movie the article was talking about that Dreadsox stole, I was going to post that He's always the first one to steal the sex stuff

I would much rather watch real sex that way than in porn. Honestly watching people have sex in a movie really isn't my thing though. Even the simulated sex can seem so awkward and unromantic that it makes me uncomfortable.

Real actors, real sex: an onscreen no-no?

By Ty Burr, Globe Staff | August 21, 2005

That scurrilous Michael Winterbottom. With his new film, the British director of ''Wonderland" and ''24 Hour Party People" has dared to blast the eyes of unwary moviegoers by showing the unshowable, by breaking the ultimate movie taboo, by going where none have gone before.

That's right, ''9 Songs" is about sex between a loving, committed couple.

Well, yes, the couple are actors, a Brit named Kieran O'Brien and an American, Margo Stilley, and their job is to convince us they're in an impassioned and lustful yearlong relationship of the type 20-somethings around the world might recognize. The sex is real and quite explicit, though, and the minor furor surrounding the film -- censorious editorials in the UK and Australia, the British-based Christian Coalition for Traditional Values condemning the film as ''a rank piece of soulless pornography" -- comes from the unaccustomed conjunction of fake characters, real congress, and a ''real" movie.

While a similar dust-up has as yet failed to ignite on this side of the ocean, a casual observer might hope it would. Completely aside from its success as art or entertainment -- on that score, the movie stands as an intriguing idea left frustratingly undeveloped -- ''9 Songs" exposes our nervously accepted notions of how and where sex is to be depicted in popular culture, what constitutes ''fake" sex as opposed to ''real" sex, and the compartmentalization necessary to keep the entire delicate scaffolding from collapsing in an interesting heap.

Since the breakdown of the old studio system in the late 1950s, commercial movies have danced closer and closer around representations of sexuality. Barriers to nudity and behavior have slowly fallen, but sexual activity has remained simulated, even if with increasing frankness. Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider weren't really making love in ''Last Tango in Paris," but the film was extreme enough for viewers to temporarily think so.

After a brief flirtation with post-'60s looseness, though, onscreen coupling in mainstream movies quickly retreated to safer and more reactionary harbors. By the late 1970s, a sexually active teenage girl was simply the next target for Michael Myers's knife in ''Halloween" (1978). These days we can handle comic bawdiness in movies like ''Wedding Crashers," but serious presentations of explicit sexuality get marginalized to art-house theaters (the films of Peter Greenaway, for example) or are jeered off the multiplex screen, like the 2003 Meg Ryan misfire ''In the Cut."

One reason for this state of affairs, obviously, is porn. The emergence of hard-core sex movies from the underground in the early 1970s, their explosion onto home video in the 1980s, and their metastasization onto the Internet in the late 1990s essentially gave Hollywood the escape clause it needed. Since the ''real thing" was readily available if you so chose -- and on increasingly private terms -- the pressure was off commercial movies to compete in prurience. In fact, the pressure was on for them not to. The dirty secret about dirty movies is that audiences feel uncomfortable watching them in a theater full of strangers (or worse, unexpected acquaintances). Home video and the Internet took porn back to the bedroom where it belonged.

But when people think of pornography as ''the real thing," it's of course anything but. There are rules -- of physical appearance, of narrative structure (such as it is), of what act follows what. Because it's product rather than storytelling and has to adhere to the demands of a paying audience, mass-market hard-core has a ritualistically defined beginning, middle, and end. Plus there's all that cheeseball music. Faithful only to baseline anatomy, porn is in many ways more repressive and repressed than mainstream culture.

So it makes sense that movies -- ''real" movies -- are beginning to experiment once more with real sex: If you can show it all and it still doesn't mean anything, what needs to be added for it to have any weight? Art? Plot? Theory? Believable characters? A personal perspective?

All have been tried in recent years. Vincent Gallo capped off 2003's ''Brown Bunny" with actress Chloe Sevigny graphically servicing the director/star -- the results were hooted down at Cannes and have since been defended as extremity in the service of expression. David Mackenzie's ''Young Adam," also from 2003, pushed the limits of simulated sex with Ewan McGregor as a callous rake in 1950s Scotland.

Then there's the French, doing their best to shock the bourgeoisie with the reverse-narrative rape of 2002's ''Irreversible" (in which the man's naughty bits were rendered digitally) and the tiresome eroto-intellectualisms of ''Anatomy of Hell" (2004), in which the pretensions and the plumbing were equally on display. That film's director, Catherine Breillat, had better luck exposing the backstage machinations of onscreen nookie with 2002's ''Sex Is Comedy," while America's Paul Thomas Anderson did the same for the San Fernando Valley porn industry of the 1970s in ''Boogie Nights" (1997). Even there, Mark Wahlberg received a prosthetic assist.

In this context, Winterbottom's ''9 Songs" is both braver and more naive. Because no self-respecting star would ever commit to fornicating on film -- celebrity depends above all on maintaining illusion, and, besides, the agents would probably want 15 percent -- the director has cast unknowns. This works to his advantage, since Matt (O'Brien) and Lisa (Stilley) have a sweet-faced and rather touching anonymity. These aren't the hard-faced fleshbots of porn videos but a believable couple doing what many kids their age do (or wish they were doing), which is go to a lot of concerts and have a lot of sex. There is tenderness, enthusiasm, laughter, banality, and, yes, there is oral sex, penetration, ejaculation, and (very) light S&M.

Is ''9 Songs" pornography? If your definition of porn is the filming of sex acts, yes. If your definition of porn is the filming of sex acts with no other aim than physical arousal, no, it's not. Is it good art? Sadly, no, since Winterbottom alternates between concert footage of some excellent bands (the Von Bondies, the Dandy Warhols, Franz Ferdinand, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club) and the couple's frolics with a regularity that quickly grows monotonous.

The more pointed questions might be: What does ''9 Songs" gain, if anything, from showing real intercourse in a non-porno context? Would the movie be any better or worse, more insightful or less moving, if it had simulated the sex like other movies? Would it be less honest, and what does ''honesty" mean when actors are playing fictional characters? (At the very least the editorials and this article wouldn't have been written, but only a cynic would accuse the ever-earnest Winterbottom of doing it solely for the attention; he's a provocateur, not a mountebank.)

Why are we so scared of real sex in movies anyway, especially when it's connected to love? Does a society benefit from building a wall between brutally functional carnality and diluted mainstream expressions of same, or is the wall maintained at the expense of considering the infinite gradations between the two? Sex is a universal and driving force in much of our society and culture -- especially popular culture -- and we isolate it at our peril. ''9 Songs" brings it out from the back room and says, look, this is what two people who care for each other do. You may hate the idea of the film, and you certainly don't have to see it if you don't want to, but Michael Winterbottom has exposed a lot more than his actors to the air.

as long as they arent getting up close full on shots on the in/out action......

im surprised no one has brought up "wild Orchid"
the sex scene at the end of that movie was very scandalous....because mickey rourke and care otis were an item alot of people were like " were they really havin sex?"
i think they were...but so what?

for people interested in this subject, they should all go out and rent the French film "Baise-moi" (translated: "fuck me")

it's about two working class girls in the Parisian suburbs who are raped, and they drive north to the ocean and along the way they have sex with lots of men and then they kill them. it's extremely graphic, both in violence and the fact that the penetrative sex is very real and right on the screen. it was filmed by porn directors and starred porn actors, but it is a "real" movie, in that it has a plot, characters, dialogue, and the graphic subject matter does pertain to the themes of the film.

i will say, however, that a rape scene with real penetration is not a pleasant experience.

and it does draw up some very pertient ethical questions for actors and actresses.

From the half hour or so I saw of it, Baise-Moi has got to be the most unerotic film ever made. It just illustrates the problem that when directors have an obsession with 'pushing out the boundaries' they seemingly become more concerned with generating 'shock horror' media coverage than producing a good film.

Most of the best erotic films were made in the '70s, and they weren't even particularly explicit in most cases (I don't mean porn but mainstream movies).

Independent movie distributor ThinkFilm said Friday that it plans to appeal the commercially problematic NC-17 rating awarded to Canadian director Atom Egoyan's "Where the Truth Lies."

The only problem is that the Motion Picture Assn. of America's Classification and Ratings Administration (CARA) says it hasn't officially published the movie's rating yet, and no appeal date has been set.

Based on a murder mystery by Rupert Holmes, "Truth" concerns an investigation into an unsolved murder that marred the career of a '50s stand-up comedy team (Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth). The film includes a menage a trois sex scene involving Bacon, Firth and actress Rachel Blanchard that many observers expect will result in an NC-17, which would make the movie off limits for viewers younger than 18.

In addition to restricting the audience, the NC-17 tag also reduces a studio's ability to market the movie, with some newspapers refusing to publish ads, and some theater owners refusing to screen such movies.

According to sources familiar with discussions between CARA and the director, Egoyan has trimmed several scenes to the point where they would earn the less-restrictive R rating but that the menage a trois scene remains in NC-17 rating territory according to CARA. "Our understanding is that you must first accept the rating, which we did Thursday, and then you can request an appeal," one source said.

When journalists queried Egoyan about the movie's possible ratings difficulties at a media luncheon at the Cannes Film Festival, the director said: "I guess I'm naive. I really had no idea it would be a problem. I just heard the deciding factor could be thrusting. Apparently, anything over three thrusts and you're in trouble. Well, nobody told me. I didn't even do covering shots, so there's nothing I can cut away to. This is what you get."

ThinkFilm chairman Robert Lantos, who also is the film's producer, acknowledged the challenge in reshaping the scene in question, saying: "This scene is done using a single sustained mastershot in order to allow the actors the most conducive environment for intimacy and intensity and in order to best communicate what happens in the film's pivotal scene. It cannot be cut without compromising the central scene of the narrative and thus rendering the mystery of the film incomprehensible. It remains more than a bit absurd to me that this scene would garner an R if shot exactly the same but from just the torso up but becomes an NC-17 because the mastershot reveals full bodies."

The film is to be released October 14 in Los Angeles and New York, with a national expansion October 21.

If an actor and an actress were to really have sexual intercourse rather than simulate it, would that change your opinion of the movie? Should the taboo of actors and actresses simulating sex be ended? Should a movies rating be changed if we find out that they were really having sex?

As was suggested before, you are now asking actors/actresses to go beyond what could be accomplished with their acting skills. Tossing real sex on the screen sounds more like a cheap marketing ploy to draw attention to a film that may not stand on the acting skills alone.